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Douglas Murray has a piece over in the WSJ worrying about the consequences of Iran getting the nuclear bomb. Of course, before we worry about what they might do with one if they got one we've got to consider whether they are in fact trying to build one at all. To which I'll attempt an educated guess as an answer.

Just as a little background, I've worked in weird metals for a couple of decades now. That's included some work on "nuclear metals" (which doesn't mean uranium, rather, the metals we use other than uranium to build plants and reactors etc). I'm not an expert in this field but I do know enough to see have an opinion about what is being done in Iran.

The two important points to consider are that Iran has indeed signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that in order to go nuclear, whether for civilian or military purposes, you need to enrich uranium.

Uranium comes (largely) in two isotopes*. Don't worry too much about this: call it two types if you like. Naturally occurring stuff is 0.7% one type, 99.3% the other. To do anything useful you need to enrich this to at least 3% that first type: which is done by taking away the second type. This is a vastly expensive process. A basic plant to do this will cost $10 billion and more.

Iran is doing this. What's more, it's researched how to do this alone, it's building it through trial and error, essentially making it vastly more expensive than if they'd gone off and bought a ready made plant.

So why are they doing it this way? The expensive way?

If you want to make a bomb you've got to enrich the uranium up to 20% that first type, at minimum. That wouldn't be a very efficient bomb but it would work. If you want to build a civilian nuclear reactor you've only got to get it up to 3-5%. There's a couple of reactor types, fast fission for example, that use the 20% enriched and more: but no one does build those. They're even more expensive than the normal type. There's also a type that makes medical isotopes for cancer treatment and the like that uses the high enriched and that's what the Iranians currently claim they're doing it for. But you can indeed make those medical treatments with a reactor that uses low enriched. And everywhere else in the world has been converting those isotope reactors to do just that.

Which brings us to the importance of their having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If you've signed that then other countries which have nuclear technology have to, yes, have to, sell you the plants and equipment that you need to build a civilian nuclear power industry. So, if you need to have a plant that can make the 3-5% enriched uranium you can just write a check and one will be built for you. Indeed, I've sat in the office of a man and listened as he excitedly told me that his company in Russia had just signed a contract with Iran to do just that, way back in the 1990s.

But no one will build you one of these plants to make the 20%, high enriched material. For you can only want to use that for either those reactors that no one uses, for naval reactors (no one's all that keen on another country running nuclear submarines) or for a bomb.

So here's how my logic works. Iran has actually rejected offers to either supply it with prepared nuclear fuel (and the associated offers to reprocess it once used) just as it has rejected the offers to build the enrichment and recycling plant to civilian standards. It is going ahead with reinventing the wheel, having to develop technologies that other countries would not just be happy to sell it but which they must sell it, assuming they're going to be civilian plants. So I'm led to the hesitant conclusion that they're not solely creating a civilian nuclear industry. Either that or they're deliberately doing everything the hard and expensive way which doesn't make much sense. It's possible that they're thinking about fast fission reactors, really are going to build an isotope reactor and thus need the highly enriched uranium. But I just can't quite being myself to see that as being the reason they're doing what they're doing.